The UCO reveals that Armengol spoke with Koldo about sanitary material, but ended up delegating management to a Director General

PalmThe President of the Congress and former President of the Government, Francina Armengol, delegated the management of the purchase of masks during the covid-19 pandemic to the management director of the Balearic Health Service, Manuel Palomino, according to a report by the UCO of the Civil Guard. The UCO has delivered to the judge of the National High Court, who is investigating possible irregularities in the relationship between administrations and the scheme of businessman Víctor de Aldama, a report on the dealings they made through Koldo García, who was then an advisor to José Luis Ábalos, to sell sanitary material to the Balearic Islands.

According to the document, when Koldo introduced himself by phone as an advisor to Ábalos, she referred him to Manuel Palomino, in the same way she did months later with the Minister of Health, Patrícia Gómez, when the Aldama group wanted to participate in passenger controls at airports. In fact, the main part of the UCO report is dedicated to the efforts to contract and implement PCR controls at airports, a task that was ultimately assumed directly by the Government.

Armengol directly addressed Koldo to ask for help in obtaining masks, to which he replied that the suppliers would give her the cost price. The report also includes the Government's claim in March 2023 against the scheme's company, Soluciones de Gestión, because the masks did not meet the required specifications. It also explains how in October 2024 the Balearic Administration declared the nullity of the mask award four years earlier, which would imply that the administrative contract "would be invalid from its origin, considering it non-existent for legal purposes, in the same way that it would imply that the parties must return what has been received under it, a circumstance whose execution is unknown".

In the report, the UCO emphasized Koldo García's "domination" in the Ministry of Transport, which he "would use in favor" of Aldama, and cites, for example, that Armengol went to the then advisor in June 2020 because she could not contact the minister.

The UCO interprets that, thanks to Koldo's intermediation, the former Balearic president managed to speak with Ábalos "with the intention of solving a problem" possibly related to the PCR tests that were being carried out to allow passenger transit. And in this "role" of Koldo García in "favor of companies" linked to Aldama, investigators also highlight how the advisor managed to get Ábalos' chief of staff to contact employees of a company related to the commissioner, presumably to close a sale of PCR tests, something that did not end up materializing.

However, the former president's appearance in the document is limited to an initial contact with Koldo García on April 25, 2020, in the context of the first steps for the acquisition of sanitary material in full pandemic. This contact is relevant because it marks the institutional entry point of the operations in the Balearic Islands, but the report does not include any subsequent message or action linking her to the concrete development of the awards.

Armengol did not give orders

Sources from the Presidency of the Congress have stated that the UCO report "confirms that Armengol never gave instructions to contract any company" and that "always, without exception, the decisions were made by technicians. Likewise, they have made it clear that it is proven that the president of the Congress did not know Koldo when he presented himself as an advisor to the Ministry, nor did she have any relationship with Mr. Aldama, whom she does not know.

They also emphasized that the UCO does not question the mask contract offered by Koldo, which was forwarded to the Health Service for technical analysis. The sources stressed that the report confirms that the technicians rejected three offers from the alleged network that they did not consider useful without any political pressure, and that the mask company was charged the price difference by product category. They also highlighted that the report dedicates 107 of its 190 pages to a PCR contract that was never carried out.

For her part, the Secretary General of the PSIB-PSOE, Francina Armengol, stated that the report “fully confirms everything I have been explaining for the past two years. The Government of the Balearic Islands always acted bravely, transparently, and committed to the general interest of the citizens of the Balearic Islands,” she said once the content of the report was known. In Armengol's opinion, “neither when sanitary material was purchased, nor when it was rejected, was it due to any political order. Quite the contrary, the purchase or rejection of sanitary material was always based on absolutely technical criteria from the technicians of the Health Service. It is also fully confirmed that neither I nor anyone in my Government ever gave a political order to contract with one company or another.”

The socialists' Secretary General added that “it is fully confirmed that everything was done following existing regulations, with existing legality, the purchase being covered by emergency by the Royal Decree-Law that we approved in the Balearic Islands and by the regulations in place nationally,” she concluded.